Rejection Letters- A Normality in the Writing World

Earlier today, I had received an email from the University of the Incarnate Word's literary journal Quirk. I had waited for this email for over a month... well, I wasn't really waiting, because I was busy with other things. But anyway, this morning, I received the email from UIW, and it turned out that they wouldn't use the short fiction that I had submitted a while back. It was just another rejection letter from another literary journal. In other words, this wasn't the first time getting a rejection letter.

I remember the first time I had submitted a writing piece to a journal (at this point, I've forgotten for what journal it was), and once the rejection letter came to me, I was so disappointed. I was disappointed, because I thought it was a good piece; and it felt sad to see a piece not get published.

However, as I grew older, and listened to all the advice that my professors from UIW and Our Lady of the Lake University had given me, I started to understand why journals would either accept or reject a piece.

Sometimes, journals may have a certain theme or topic that they want to focus on for an upcoming issue. Other times, they just want good quality work. So not surprisingly, writers are always competing with each other to get their works recognized in literary journals. Therefore, in my case, I was competing against other writers that had submitted to Quirk.

All the time, the editors must go through what they call the slush pile of submissions. And a lot of those times, they have to separate the wheat from the shaft--they have to pick out the acceptable works, and do away with the rejected.
I was an editor for both UIW's Quirk for a semester (or maybe two semesters), and then I was an editor for one semester at OLLU. And I guarantee you: picking and choosing works to have in a literary journal is NOT easy. It takes collaboration and debate--You're either defending a work, or saying no to it.
And that was probably what happened with the piece that I had submitted to Quirk: There were people either defending the work, or rejecting it entirely. And that's totally normal.

Now, I sort of knew that I would get rejected this time anyway, because of one thing: Besides being used to a rejection letter, I think that the main reason that I got the rejection was because I didn't give it my all. The short fiction piece that I had submitted didn't feel right, in my eyes. I remember spending a few days on the story, until submitting it to Quirk, and then feeling bad about it, because I didn't give it more time to develop.
And, to be fair, I was more focused on the Dolphin Princess book series--working on Book 3--rather than anything else. I was busy with my book series, that submitting to a literary journal at the time was out of the question. But I had submitted a fiction piece anyways, and I was told no, that it wasn't good enough to be in the literary journal. Maybe it was probably for the best, because again, I'm more focused on my book series right now than anything else.

But only time will tell when I decide to submit another writing piece to another journal. I can't promise another submission anytime soon, because of me working on my book series... but it may happen again.
So, the moral of this blog post is that writers aren't safe from getting rejection letters; it's a part of being a writer. You just got to deal with it.

TO BUY BOOK 1: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dolphin-princess-veronica-gonzalez/1129202183

TO PRE-ORDER BOOK 2: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1130458196?ean=9781987021233

Veronica Gonzalez